Episode 25 – Propaganda, Revelations, & Prosperity: The End of Neoliberalism with Scott Ferguson

Macro N Cheese – Episode 25 
Propaganda, Revelations, & Prosperity: The End of Neoliberalism with Scott Ferguson 
July 20, 2019 

Scott Ferguson [intro/music] (00:02): 

Money usually stands for selfish success in getting all that finite stuff for yourself. And then we treat it in a really ambivalent way. Right? We want it, but we sort of know it’s necessarily antisocial and alienating. 

Scott Ferguson [intro/music] (00:20): 

We say these ridiculous things like let’s get money out of politics. What are you talking about? First of all, that’s impossible. Second of all, let’s get public money into politics and let’s get private Koch money out of politics. 

Geoff Ginter [intro/music]  (00:33): 

Now let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine. 

Steve Grumbine (01:34): 

All right. And this is Steve Grumbine with Macro N Cheese. I am outrageously excited to have my friend and scholar Scott Ferguson join us. Scott is an Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of Humanities and Cultural Studies at the University of South Florida. He is also a research scholar at The Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity, co-director of The Modern Money Network, humanities division and producer of the Money on the Left Podcast.  

His current research and teaching focus on modern monetary theory and critiques of neoliberalism, theories of social dependence, aesthetic theory, and the history of digital animation and visual effects. He has published in Screen, Boundary 2 Online, Monthly Review Online, Key Parlay, CounterPunch, Liminalities, Naked Capitalism, Dollars and Cents, Fless Beck Economics International, In the Moment, Critical Inquiry, Rebellion, and Contexto y Accion, his book, “Declarations of Dependence: Money, Aesthetics and the Politics of Care was published in 2018 by University of Nebraska Press.  

Scott Ferguson, forgive me for butchering your bio, but welcome, sir. How are you today? 

Scott Ferguson (02:58): 

I’m doing great. Thanks for having me. And I apologize for keeping that enormous bio on your tongue. 

Steve Grumbine (03:07): 

That’s okay, man. That’s okay. So for me, this is really exciting because, you know, we tend to focus as you know, on Modern Monetary Theory. We’re fellow travelers. The subject matter that I really want to touch on today, I believe is a subject that you alone are probably the expert. I can think of nobody else that I’d want to ask these questions.  

So one of the concerns that the progressive movement has is breaking it’s identity away from its neoliberal past, breaking away from the scourge of neoliberalism. And so many people have been locked in for so long that they don’t know where that division is. They don’t know where the dividing line is.  

They don’t realize how much of this corrosive ideology has permeated the movement. And you sir are an expert in this field and it blows my mind how many ways, this particular mindset, this thinking, this ethos, this condition, if you will, has permeated all aspects of our culture. Can you talk about what neoliberalism is and where its origins are and we’ll go from there. 

Scott Ferguson (04:23): 

Oh boy. Neoliberalism. So Neoliberalism is an outgrowth of modern liberalism and modern liberalism really gets going in the 18th and 19th centuries in Britain and France and elsewhere. I usually distinguish between what I would call big L liberalism versus small L liberalism. So most Americans are very aware of small L liberalism.  

When we say the word liberal, you know, we think of an FDR Democrat, or at least somebody in that tradition, we think, you know, so called big government, welfare state. You know, we have the expression bleeding heart liberal, this sort of thing. That’s not really what big L liberalism is. Big L liberalism really descends from the writings and politics of people like John Locke and Adam Smith and more and big L liberalism was really pushing back against the monarchy and the aristocracy and European society.  

And they were sort of waging their own class war against those higher powers. And were making the claim that unfettered commerce was better or more productive for society, than more, let’s say, government directed social production. Now the big L liberals had a role for the state. They understood that the state was very much necessary and needed, and there was a role for social welfare provisioning on the side of the state.  

But what big L liberalism really ended up justifying, it’s a complicated story, is that throughout the 19th century, we see more and more rarefied developments of a kind of laissez-faire ideology. Basically this sense that, you know, the market is a kind of God, right? And we are familiar with Adam Smith’s expression, the invisible hand, the invisible hand will take care of everything, the balance of supply and demand.  

Everything will kind of work out. And of course this caused havoc. It was very much a kind of political ruse that the ruling class used to push millions of people into alienating wage labor, and the like. So, you know, that’s liberalism and big L liberalism was really, you know, got pushed back upon.  

And that really started happening, especially in this country, with various kinds of populist movements, some of which were very aware of the way money was constructed, that it was a creature of the state and law, and that could be used for the people. In other ways, you saw the rise of the progressive movement and the progressive era.  

And then you see people like John Maynard Keynes writing, trying to debunk and critique the kinds of wild and really intense liberal commitments of the late 19th century. And then we get, you know, this post World War II, New Deal kind of compromise where there’s a sense that the, you know, the state has to direct things and has to be involved.  

But the problem with this is it still retained this small L liberal era that we associate with midcentury United States prosperity. It still retained a lot of the same assumptions and problems of big L liberalism. And in fact, a colleague of mine, Jakob Feinig, has done work an making the argument that part of the New Deal order and part of the New Deal compromise was FDR and the FDR administration, providing all kinds of new opportunities for Americans, but only so long as they kind of basically agreed to drop the money question, to not ask where money comes from, to not push back and claim it as a public utility, but to say, “You know, okay, well, we’ll get these nice 30 year mortgages.  

We’ll have a GI Bill. We’ll go to college. We’ll build a big white suburban middle class, but we’re not going to mess with the money question.” Right? And that was a compromise that lasted before, you know, 35, 40 years, the money question, except for, you know, a few people along the way was not being asked, was not being theorized, was not being asserted in any contrary way.  

And there was a group of Europeans largely centered around a man named Friedrich Hayek, an Austrian, who hung out in England with John Maynard Keynes occasionally who had what back then they were calling neoliberalism. Why? Because they wanted to push back. They wanted to roll back the assertion of the state in the United States and across Western Europe and across the world.  

And they have a vision of society that you could say radicalizes the big L liberal vision of society. It’s one that sees the market as really a tremendously magical God and Hayek himself really liked this metaphor of a calculating machine. This is the moment when the US government spending a lot of money, uh, you know, and it’s a military industrial complex then basically funding the rise of things like cybernetics and machine learning and things like this.  

And Hayek took these ideas about, you know, a kind of machine that learns on its own, right? And the machine is somehow wiser than any given individual. And it becomes this, you know, God-like calculating auctioneer in the sky that takes care of everything. And what you need is a strong state to make sure that that market can perform it’s calculating magic, but you gotta push it back.  

You gotta roll back that mid-century welfare state program. And, you know, they fought long and hard. They created, you know, one of the first, what we call think tanks today, the Mont Pelerin Society. If you read the history, it’s a very complicated nuance history. They had a lot of funding. They created a whole network of embedded structures where they’re trying to influence government and corporations all over the world with this ideology, you know, they’re getting spokespeople to sort of be on their side.  

They make friends with the University of Chicago, neoclassical economists with whom they don’t necessarily agree economically, but they agree politically. And you know, next thing you know, there’s a paradigm crisis with so-called stagflation in the 1970s. And the ruling elites were really feeling a lot of pressure from a really intensified, not only civil rights movement and antiwar movement, but also labor movement in the early 1970s.  

And they wanted to push back. They wanted their world back. They wanted their ruling powers back. And that’s when the neoliberals and the neoclassicals at Chicago and other places like George Mason rolled in and said, “Hey, do we have a story for you.” And, you know, the rest is the Reagan-Thatcher revolution in history.  

And we’ve been living it for about 40 years since. And I would say that since the financial crisis, that the neoliberal faith in this God-like, calculating market has only decreased. And certainly in the 2016 election, I think by that time we were seeing interrelated crises across spectrums of our society, whether it was the rebirth of vocalized racism on the right, or it was the hyper-politicization of police brutality against people of color and the rise of Black Lives Matter.  

Or it was the fact that essentially this story that the central bankers and technocrats had been telling about what a central bank is and does and what it should be doing in relationship to fiscal policy and the do’s and don’ts of all this, and what’s going to happen if you don’t follow by these rules that started falling apart.  

So I think we’re in another very exciting moment of a broad scale paradigm crisis, where the truths of neoliberalism are starting to break down. That set the very thing that I study the most and that I’m interested in, in the most culture, aesthetics from high culture to pop and mass culture that’s really far behind.  

And I think that neoliberalism’s tentacles are, I mean, I could say they’re, enmeshed in our aesthetic and popular culture, but I’ll just say our aesthetic and popular culture, it basically just is neoliberal culture. There’s no enmeshing. It is neoliberalism. It is neoliberalism, what in the Marxist tradition we call etiology, that kind of background assumptions and values that structure our innermost thoughts and feelings and desires, and you know, what makes us laugh?  

What makes us cry? What makes us horny? What makes us, you know, everything? 

Steve Grumbine (13:58): 

So, you know, I oftentimes bring this up because it’s just such a striking overt assault on the senses. When Roseanne Barr came back onto the air here recently, there was an episode where her and her sister, and it may have been the very first episode, quite frankly, where they had come back. And apparently the sister had voted for Jill Stein and Roseanne kept taunting and teasing, or apparently this was a really big dividing point in the family, this political divide.  

Roseanne mocked her for her desire for Medicare for all. And in that mocking, she said, “You know, the only problem with you people is eventually you run out of other people’s money to spend on these dumb ideas.” And it hit me like a ton of bricks. Here I am watching a sitcom and I am listening to neoliberal indoctrination right there.  

Boom, right there, no question about it. There was no swift rebuttal. There was no fair imbalance. There was no kind of nuanced discussion. It was one of those shut cases where you just simply say the line and then the rest is history. And for me, it really struck a nerve because, you know, I’ve been just doing this MMT advocacy now, you know, for maybe six to seven years in like earnestness.  

And I’ve been exposed to it for about 10 years now. And you know, I’ve seen leaps and bounds of change, but my goodness to see something so overt, so unapologetically neoliberal, it just shook me at my core. I mean, you nailed it when you said there is no permeating, it is neoliberal culture. We live in a neoliberal society.  

How do we break that down, Scott? How do we move away from that? What are some of the steps we can take to mitigate this disaster? 

Scott Ferguson (15:52): 

Yeah, that’s the question, isn’t it. So let me just say really quickly. I think that just in response to Roseanne, she’s been getting, getting herself into a lot of trouble recently. But I’ll say one of the things that’s really feels like a terrible betrayal on her part is that within this neoliberal culture, you know, in the context of the early nineties recession, you know, Roseanne, her act and then her sitcom, you know, it was about working class Americans and kind of gave voice to suffering even on a corporate network television show.  

And so now she’s a very rich woman and probably doesn’t see herself as aligned with the people she was trying to represent decades ago, but it’s, it’s just, you know, so tragically shameful for her to pull that. To your bigger question . . . I think that there’s always a project of critique and then a project of construction and both are equally important and you can’t really do one without the other.  

And I think, you know, critique also can be constructive in its own right. Because we learn things about ourselves constructively by doing critique. And critique as I practice it, and in my training, through my PhD and what I teach my students, it’s not simply about calling out something is wrong, right?  

So we do want to do that. We want to say, look at this novel, look at this film, look at this actress, Roseanne Barr. Look at what they’re saying and look how that’s wrong. Okay, fine. But we can go further than that and try to trace and unmoor the ways that neoliberal culture works on us and how we’re invested in it.  

And one way I would say we could do so that kind of goes beyond the always just explicit level of, you know, basically being contrary to something that MMT knows to be false is really just to start with, you know, how does money, money is a medium. How do we make sense of it in our popular culture, in our music, in our television shows and our streaming shows, in our movies, or in our internet memes?  

What does money mean? And I’ll say that, you know, one of the horrifying things about the way that neoliberal culture deals with money and neoliberal culture didn’t invent this. It’s part of a much broader project that I think comes from big L liberal modern culture. And, you know, it sort of starts, I didn’t say this the first time around, but now swing back around and say, you know, big L liberalism and certainly in a more extreme way for neoliberalism, your money is essentially this private finite decentralized thing that as Stephanie Kelton says grows on rich people, right?  

And so it’s zero sum game. You want it. You want money. You want money for yourself. Maybe you want it for, you know, your family. Maybe you’d like it for your friends. It belongs to the winners. It doesn’t really belong to the losers. And the government always seems like a big loser because it’s always clamoring to get it.  

And so what happens in modern culture and then in neoliberal culture even more so is that our relationship to money is so screwed up. It’s our lifeblood, right? Actually I don’t want to use that term blood. That’s miserable. It’s our oxygen, right? It’s our connection to one another. It’s the centralized medium that organizes us as a collective, but how do we make sense of it in popular culture?  

Like think about your favorite pop songs that are about money, whether it’s, you know, Pink Floyd or the Beatles, or it’s Biggie Smalls, or it’s Cardi B you know, money usually stands for selfish success, right. And getting all that finite stuff for yourself. And then we treat it in a really ambivalent way.  

Right? We want it, but we sort of know it’s necessarily antisocial and alienating. The best song writers get really ironic and cheeky about it, and cheeky about the desire for it and how that kind of screws everything up, but we can’t help doing so. And, you know, just recognizing the fact that, you know, we don’t have a culture that like allows us to affirm money in a public collective way.  

We have no social forums to do that. We have no association with genres of music that do that certain, like, you know, the distortion of a guitar, right. The things that, you know, move us in our inner core, everything that connects with money is this like scary ambivalent thing then leaks into our political speech.  

Right. And we say these ridiculous things, like let’s get money out of politics. Yeah. What are you talking about? First of all, that’s impossible. Second of all, let’s get public money into politics and let’s get, you know, private Koch money out of politics. Right. We need more money in politics.  

Right. You know, we have these expressions, like our political opponents, the elites, the Kochs, the lobbyists, you know, they’re big money, right. But like, you know what, I’ll tell you, who’s big money. The federal government is the biggest money, but we don’t use that expression. And so from our popular music and all of its sophisticated ways that it turns our soul all the way to our political rhetoric, it’s all connected.  

So trying to kind of tease out the limits of our popular neoliberal culture, I think is step one. And I think that there’s so much work to be done. And that’s one of the things that we in the humanities division at the Modern Money Network are trying to do in our podcasts, but also in our own research and in our conferences and things like this.  

And then, we hope to inspire artists of all stripes – professional, amateur, the whole gamut – to join in and start making some more affirmative public oriented, collectivist art, and culture that’s going to allow us to imagine and feel money as our oxygen. You know, I’ve been an artist off and on in my life.  

That’s not really what I’m doing right now. Maybe at some point I’ll dive in and put my heart into that. Right now I feel like using my voice and using my pen to make these problems visible. I’m hopefully inviting, you know, young and old artists and media makers to do something differently with it.  

And to me, the answer is not some Pollyanna, money is good, hip hip, hooray, three cheers for money; but rather, money is complicated. Money is fraught. Money is fraught with power relations. It’s fraught with, you know, the riddles of like, how are we going to take care of one another. It’s fraught with all kinds of things.  

So money’s not easy hip hip, hooray. No, let’s have some fun, interesting, complicated, exciting, horrifying, even popular culture and art practices that are like taking on money for the genuine problem and opportunity that it presents rather than essentially hiding behind this kind of ironic, sarcastic, ambivalent critique of money. And then really just letting everybody off the hook of having to like imagine money in a different way. 

Steve Grumbine (23:47): 

You know, you bring up something and it just strikes me . . . the cynical nature of the activists today that hasn’t taken the time to really kind of learn about the nature of money. They take, what I consider it’s like short sheeting the bed. They don’t go the full way through to really think it through.  

And they end up creating their own myths and legends that are equally as wrong as some of the ones that were perpetuated by the people that had nefarious intent and others. These concepts of, you know, bloodline and Rothschilds and the central banking conspiracies and so forth have permeated the culture to the point where people are stuck in some form of cryogenic sleep, where they’re absolutely spinning in circles or they’re sitting in neutral.  

And, you know, they’ve basically embraced what I consider to be the progressive give up strategy where they go, “It’s just too big for me. There’s nothing we can do about it.” These Rothschilds, these central banks, they this, they that the other, and that popular culture that folklore has enmeshed itself within so many different aspects of our culture that we really are really running against a buzz saw here of not only the people that are trying to keep us in this feudal state, but for those who would otherwise be allies in helping fight against such things are trapped in a folklore scenario of their own making.  

Can you talk a little bit about how the folk lore, if you will, has impacted the aesthetic that impacts all of our lives, this overall cultural norm and the skepticism that it brings? 

Scott Ferguson (25:35): 

Yeah. I mean, I agree with you, honestly, I think you have a lot more experience with the Rothchild conspiracy theorist and those types. Somehow I luckily skirt around those folks and those so-called debates. What can I say? You know, I think that I have to be careful about how I put this, but I think that Occupy Wall Street is potentially symptomatic of this neoliberal political culture and then larger culture that surrounds it.  

I’ll start by saying that Occupy Wall Street, I support it 110%. It was an important watershed moment. I was down here in Florida. So, you know, I greatly admire and I was cheering on what was going on in Zuccotti Park, but I will say that it seemed conspicuous to me. And especially the more I was learning about Modern Monetary Theory and related schools that this group decided what they wanted to do was occupy Wall Street, rather than say what has been really a tried and true tradition throughout the 20th century, which was marching on Washington.  

And, you know, I don’t have a lot of deep evidence for this, but it struck me as interesting that, you know, it seemed like they were going to the source to the heart of the problem and to where maybe we collectively consciously or unconsciously thought all the money’s at, right. So we’re going to occupy Wall Street.  

Now, I think that sure, that’s where a lot of political power is. So, you know, I’m not against occupying Wall Street, but for a mass movement like that, it seemed to me like a more effective campaign and strategy could have been to, you know, occupy DC, right, or occupy Congress and occupy the public purse.  

But I don’t think that that was part of the political imagination of Occupy Wall Street. Does that mean that Occupy Wall Street didn’t have solutions? Of course they did. I mean, incredible things came out of Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Wall Street was not a heterogeneous event by any stretch of the imagination.  

And I know from following it that there was plenty of disagreement, but it does strike me as interesting that it wasn’t about Washington and getting our public purse back. It was about being angry about and rightfully angry, but nevertheless angry primarily at the financial elite. Yeah. That’s my thought about the ways that I think leftist political culture has been hindered by this broader neoliberal understanding of money is a private finite and essentially decentralized abstract thing that floats around.  

And it gets captured by individuals by financial speculators on Wall Street. That said, you know, as part of this exciting moment, this paradigm crisis that’s happening right now is showing us that that’s not the only option. And we have, you know, movements that the modern money movement is becoming increasingly allied with, right – Fed Up, the movement politicizing the Fed’s historical policies of higher interest rates and essentially keeping people unemployed.  

The Debt Collective that came out of Occupy Wall Street has allied with Modern Monetary Theory as well. And maybe most excitingly, we have Sunrise, which is doing incredible work and putting the Green New Deal on the table and on, you know, on everybody’s lips, on everybody’s fingers, on their media equipment.  

And they’re down, they’re down for the public purse and they’re down for the MMT framing and it’s a complicated situation, but you know, the Green New Deal accompanying documents to the resolution, which were crafted in part by our friend, Robert Hockett, has MMT framing in it. You know, you can say Sunrise as pop culture, you know, it’s political culture, but it’s pop culture too.  

And it is metaphorically and literally marching on Washington. So I think we’re breaking through, I really, really do. We’ve got a long haul left, but something is happening. 

Intermission (30:21): 

You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast brought to you by Real, Progressives a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching the masses about MMT or Modern Monetary Theory. Please help our efforts and become a monthly donor at PayPal or Patreon, like and follow our pages on Facebook and YouTube and follow us on Periscope, Twitter, and Instagram. 

Steve Grumbine (31:10): 

You know, I think the juxtaposition between what you see in Sunrise and what you see in the various organizations you leveraged, including your own at Modern Money Network and the things we’re trying to do at RP here, you’ve got this other side and that is the political sphere where these politicians such as Bernie Sanders, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and even peripherally Elizabeth Warren.  

You’ve got people out there who are involved with MMT people, that have access to MMT people, that have the understanding of the money relationship and have the understanding of how federal finance works and its impact on the fiscal space. And they have the right sensibilities, but yet when they go to speak, they are completely hamstrung by the neoliberal culture that has this erroneous belief in the idea that taxation is actually funding the programs they’re advocating for.  

And it doesn’t require a mathematician, a PhD theorist to see that the dollars of taxation do not add up to the dollars spent on these programs. So after a little while, it’s a head scratcher how you come up with 750 million for the military while simultaneously crying poor mouth, when it comes to healthcare or a Green New Deal, or a student debt or any number of things.  

So why are these politicians so restrained, so held back? Is it ignorance on their part? I don’t think so. They’ve been exposed to it. I’ll just cut to the chase. My belief is, is that pop culture is not caught up to the truth and reality. And these politicians are unfortunately stuck playing the game of the day, which is I got to get elected by people that don’t understand this thing.  

So I better speak the language they understand, which has a lot of negative consequences that go with it as well. Can you describe maybe the humanities aesthetic aspect of the political crisis that we face in terms of what these politicians are capable of saying in front of a large room with a camera and a mic while simultaneously trying to fight for votes? 

Scott Ferguson (33:40): 

Yeah. Right. I mean, this is the big question. Yeah. Clearly I agree with you the way you framed it. I, like you, will get frustrated at Bernie Sanders and AOC, right. Who when . . . We sort of know that they know better. Right? And then they come out and say things that we wish they wouldn’t. I have sympathy.  

And I do think they, you know, in a very real way, they have to say things that are gonna sound legible and legitimate to their constituents and to the world. And, you know, I think as Stephanie Kelton will often say, it’s our job. And of course Real Progressives has gone further than, than any other organization to do this.  

It’s our job to make it okay for the Bernie’s and the AOCs and the others to speak up and to do what they love to do speak truth to power, but include the money message and show how incredibly important it is for all their messages. That said, you know, others do, others do speak up. Ro Khanna from California is, you know, he’s very out, I think on, on the record as being pro MMT.  

There are others. I also think my own experience in Florida politics, just moment to moment, things are changing really, really quickly. And you know, I, as some of your listeners might know, I just gave a talk, an Intro to MMT talk at the recent what’s called Florida Blue Democratic Leadership Meeting.  

It’s an annual meeting of all the top Democrats, their leaders, everybody who’s anybody, or who wants to be anybody in Florida politics, goes to this big meeting. They move it around. This year it was in Orlando with the Disney Hotel area and the Progressive Caucus of the Florida Democratic Party invited me to talk to the Progressives and anybody else who wandered into the room about MMT.  

And the room seats about 160 people. It was standing room only. And the audience was lit. I mean, it took me a back. I was like, I was getting like applaud lines on things that I thought I was going to be able to breeze through. And it’s like, slow me down. 

Steve Grumbine (36:10): 

Hold on. I got to interrupt you. I got to tease you for a second. So I watched you give this presentation and I’ve had the luxury of meeting you several times and you’re always cool, calm and collected and lighthearted. And I saw you rocking at that lectern. And it was like, I could feel the energy through you.  

Like it wasn’t like you were just teaching a class somewhere or you were maybe talking amongst friends. I mean, you couldn’t stay, still. You were so . . . I could feel like I wasn’t there, but I wanted to be there because the energy was so just this, I mean, it was right there. It was dripping off you.  

And it couldn’t have just been the topic. Cause you’ve told that topic a bazillion times. You were getting energy back from that crowd. And that was very, very apparent. So I wanted to tell you, it came through the video, man. 

Scott Ferguson (37:06): 

That’s great. That’s great to hear. Yeah. I mean, it was electrifying, you know, I was electrified to be there. To me, it was such an enormous event. I mean, you know, we’ve got people talking to, you know, Bernie and AOC and others, but this was like more, I mean, not absolutely bottom up, but indigenous Florida Democrats like getting excited about MMT and wanting to share it.  

So that yeah, I felt so energized. And then when the room was so energized, I was, yeah, it was incredible. And I think one of the reasons for the rocking is that I started talking and I said, can everybody hear me? And people said, no. So then I had to like glue my mouth to the microphone. And so my face had to be like low and next to the mic, but the rest of my body had to like go wild.  

So that’s what you saw. And you know, I’ve started talking more and more to local politicians, a woman named Jessica Harrington, who’s running for the state house against this guy, James Grant, in Florida. James Grant is responsible for smacking that poll tax on amendment four, the voting rights act for former felons and she’s going up against him.  

And, you know, I don’t want to out her too much on the show, but I can tell you that she’s very excited about MMT. She’s working local state level. So, you know, she’s not going to be necessarily, you know, going straight to Congress. Um, but you know, everywhere is local, right. And we’re all dependent on that public purse.  

And so we need people at all kinds of levels talking about the responsibilities and the shared responsibilities of the federal government and the state government. And, you know, honestly we shouldn’t be, you know, rigidly balancing books or practicing sound finance at the state level either. Right?  

And so I’m talking to her and she’s excited. She’s raring to go. You know, we’ll see what happens with that. But I think this shows me that activities on the ground are moving very quickly. And what seemed crazy yesterday, today is going to just be like, totally fine and welcome tomorrow. And people like Harrington, I think are maybe going to be part of this transformation. At least I hope. 

Steve Grumbine (39:27): 

That’s fantastic. So I want to ask you a question that’s near and dear to my heart. You know, as we look around at social norms and, you know, we all feel a sense of, I don’t know, our heartbreaks and aches when we see children who have been born with physical ailments, mental ailments, developmental ailments, sensory elements, and so forth.  

And I think that it’s kind of a universal thing. It doesn’t matter what political party you’re in. Doesn’t matter where you’re from. You feel a sense of compassion when you see a child with special needs. And for me, I look at my son who is autistic and his care is intense. It is absolutely intense.  

We start in the mornings with everything from speech therapy, to eating therapy, to sensory therapy and making sure that he is included because he’ll go off by himself and do various things. So it requires specialty services like this thing called a BSC, which basically helps him with his behaviors, and a TSS, which helps with him during a day at a daycare and so forth.  

So there’s all these aspects of care that are directly tied to things that I believe the state is perfectly positioned to facilitate. Would it make sense aesthetically and throughout to leverage those points of understanding where we all have a soft spot, where our guard goes down, and we’re capable of having a conversation that exceeds the partisanship that we’re so accustomed to seeing in this country, could that be an angle by which we could make a bit of a tip of the spear to, to maybe make an even larger drive through the front lines of this war?  

I’m just curious as to whether or not you see a ray of light there, because for me, I know we waited a year for my son to get services. He was on a waiting list and as a parent, there’s very little support in the system and so forth. And these are the kinds of cultural norms that are becoming more and more prevalent in society.  

More kids, I mean, autism in and of itself has exploded. So I think to myself as we watch these, you know, various sitcoms and all the different political speeches and the various activists and organizations, that this is an area of opportunity that we are just not seizing the day on. Can you talk about that for just a second? 

Scott Ferguson (42:06): 

Well, I agree. I agree that whether it’s autism or it’s frontline communities and people of color who are being destroyed by the effects of climate change or the people suffering from opioid addiction, we have a collective of suffering people who need our attention and care, and certainly I would say highlighting that, I think your idea about getting people to meet on these shared values, I think is so, so important.  

What I will say as a, let’s say a qualification or a complication or a warning is that the framework in which we do this matters and not just to get money right, or to get fiscal policy right, or those sorts of things. But when we, as a culture, truly deep down believe that money, and really just our whole collective life together is a zero sum game, it kind of just perverts all these universal appeals.  

You know, and something that I’ve talked about elsewhere is the way that it creates two kind of political cultures, which presented in caricature form really puts this perversion into relief. So you have the Republican and I’m thinking about, you know, a kind of caricature of a so-called middle class, you know, American Republican who works hard for their money and wants to keep all the money that they’ve worked hard for.  

And they look at people that don’t look like them, don’t sound like them. People, you know, who have fled from other countries to come to this country. And they say, you know, I barely have enough for myself. I’m not giving you any of mine. You’re not taking my tax money for those people. And then you’ve got the altruistic bleeding, heart liberal position, which is, you know, look I make enough, please, please, please take my tax money and deliver it to those who need it.  

And I’m a good person, and that Republican over there is not a good person and I’m altruistic. And that person over there who’s a Republican is not altruistic, they’re selfish. And, you know, and then that caricature will then become excessive to the point where, you know, like there was a South Park episode, you know, years ago about, I think it was like San Francisco liberals who liked the smell of their own farts.  

Right? And I don’t think any of these characters are like actual people, but they do infuse and color who we are and who we are to one another and how we debate with one another and how we feel about one another. And I think that whole game of, you know, there’s the nice altruistic ones who want to give up their tax money and the meanies who want to keep it to themselves is such not only nonsense, but just ruins any kind of appeal to some sort of middle ground, because we always sort of imagine someone’s got to lose, right? 

Steve Grumbine (45:32): 

Yes. Yes. See, to me that is the core of MMT to me. I mean, obviously there’s a million other things you can derive from this. It’s such a deep, well thought out set of coherent, you know, beliefs and ideas and theories that are pulled together to create this body of knowledge. But for me, the biggest thing is, is that I realized that we don’t have to make somebody lose, to make other people win, that we all can win.  

And that once we dispel the myth that we have to take from others to give to others in order to make society whole, that we can in fact, make people whole period, whether they be refugees or whether they be the poor or whether they be people that have fallen on hard times through maybe mistakes of their own doing.  

We can make people whole. There’s no reason to pit group A against group B, which in my understanding, based on Phillip Moraski’s discussions, he basically says there’s a pitting of one group against another group to keep the divide alive and well, the balkanization of various interests. So I think that’s why I like MMT so much beyond just the fact that it’s truth.  

I think that that principle there really, really allows us to come together under a completely different paradigm that I believe is fundamental to changing the world. What do you think? Have I gone too far into a LA LA land or . . . 

Scott Ferguson (47:10): 

No, no, absolutely lots of merit. I really agree. And you know, there’s a long time and pretty well known, leftist, socialist, progressivist critique of the ways that capitalists will, you know, divide and conquer, right. You’re a capitalist in the South with no labor laws, “right to work state,” and you’ve got a chicken factory and you’ve got a history of African American workers working for you for very little money without any kind of union protection or benefits or anything like that.  

And then, Oh, you see an opportunity to bring in some Latin American workers who are fleeing from some, you know, climate and political crisis. Then you bring them in and you pay them even less than the African Americans are making. And then they don’t speak the same language and they start just going after one another and you undercut, you know, everybody’s bargaining power and everybody loses and that’s, I mean, that’s happening.  

And there’s a long critique of that. But I think what the MMT framework brings into it is the kind of more fundamental point that what allows this kind of divide and conquering class warfare and racial warfare to take place is everyone’s presumption that money is this finite private zero sum game. And it’s such a powerful lever for that kind of division.  

I mean, I would say it really it’s the basis of all of these divisions, which, you know, I don’t think either one of us are claiming that then MMT means kumbaya, Shangri-La, everybody hold hands. We’re all, you know. Right. I imagine all kinds of battles about, you know, what gets to be a program under the job guarantee and various kinds of — is sex work going to be under the job guarantee, and a right wing saying no, and trying to say, look, the whole entire job guarantee is a big prostitution ring and you know, it’ll be nasty, right.  

But nasty in a different way. Right? And I think hopefully there’ll be a lot less nastiness and it’ll all be happening hopefully in a way that you could say is a contest within and about abundance rather than a contest that’s predicated on this, just vacuum of privation. That’s just sucking everybody toward the bottom that is just not necessary. 

Steve Grumbine (49:31): 

You know, that’s a great point. You know, you kind of brought up some things in there that I want to close out with this one, this is kind of a big one to me. You know, obviously we’re watching children in cages. We’re watching families in cages at the border and we’re hearing the term concentration camp brought out.  

And this brings about some thoughts and visions of Nazi, Germany and Auschwitz and other such things. And, you know, there are people that see that as a travesty to even compare it to such things. And yet at the same time, there are many and myself included, they feel it’s an apropos comparison, but this right here, this aesthetic stems from the scarcity of money, this belief that we can’t take care of our own evidenced by us not taking care of our own.  

And then flip side is you see this invading army of refugees coming up, seeking shelter and employment and seeking opportunity. And all the fearfulness brought on by this neoliberal paradigm makes so many look at them and say, “Get them out of our country. We don’t want them. We don’t need them. They’re stealing from us.  

They’re taking from our veterans, blah, blah, blah.” This mindset is so deeply corrosive to what I believe most of us thought America was intended to be; and more importantly, what a human reaction should be. This particular paradigm I believe is directly answered by an understanding of the money relationship and programmatically through the job guarantee.  

Can you let us finish off with the humanity aspect of watching refugees seeking asylum in the United States and being caged like animals because of this aesthetic, this ideological bend that is so corrosive. 

Scott Ferguson (51:27): 

Yeah. You know, there’s so many ways I can take this. I mean, one way is to say that I agree. I think that this situation, these are concentration camps. And then the question of whether it’s like the thirties and the Nazi situation, it is and it isn’t. I think certainly Trumpism is demagoguery and exploiting people’s fears in a situation of unnecessary privation.  

And that’s very much what was happening under Hitler and Mussolini, Franco and elsewhere. On the other hand, I’ll tell you why Trump is not a fascist because Trump doesn’t actually spend a lot of money. I mean, he’ll give these tax breaks. From what I can tell, he’s just a even nastier version of the Republican agenda for the last 40 years.  

You know, he’s illiterate, he’s an embarrassment, you know, he’s an evil person, but at least the old school fascists, like they promised people jobs cause they were out of work and the chosen ones who got the jobs, I mean, there were jobs, there were jobs for them. In terms of today, yeah, you know, the job guarantee, it’s many, many things.  

It’s a legal right for hopefully any resident in our country, not just citizen, but any resident in our country to be able to participate in a formal way and in a dignified way. But it’s also what we call a macroeconomic stabilizer. But you know, sometimes I think we lose forest for the trees when we use that economic term, macroeconomic stabilizer.  

I mean, you could say that, yes, it keeps the value of the dollar, the price level at a good level or whatever. Um. But you know, it’s a political, social, cultural stabilizer, right? I mean, you know, you think about what is the job guarantee going to do. It’s going to bring communities together. It’s going to create new communities.  

It’s going to create new possibilities for democratic action, whether it simply being embedded, involved, and responsible in a local public workplace, or it’s building up institutions of participatory democracy and using what some of our friends are advocating for the apparatuses of participatory budgeting and things like that.  

And it’s really, to me about cultivation, the creation of value, the steering of our culture in a way that erases this fantasy of privacy and privation that is, you know, making that giant sucking sound at the center of our society. And so then when people come to our shores or borders seeking refuge or asylum, you know, we should be able to say the more the merrier.  

We should be able to say, you know, Oh, wow. Yeah, we got stuff for you to do, you know, hold this person’s hand or pick up this shovel or, you know, can you install this over there? And, Oh, well, we’ll teach you how to do it. I mean, it really should be a no brainer. It really, really should be. But right now I think, you know, things like the wall and things like the camps are, you know, the neoliberal order asserting themselves in the most violent, symptomatic ways that to me suggests that this order is in its death throws rather than being anything like ascendant or, you know, a transition to a new dark age.  

I can not predict the future, but I think that Trumpism is the end of something. Not really the beginning of anything. 

Steve Grumbine (55:07): 

Oh, wow. What a great ending. Scott, thank you so much for that. And what I would like to do is let you let folks know how they can follow you in your work. And I want to thank you in advance of that, but go ahead, let them know how do we follow you, sir? 

Scott Ferguson (55:23): 

All right. So there’s Twitter at @videotroph, it’s V I D E O T R O P H. That’s one place you can friend me on Facebook. I haven’t reached my maximum 5,000 yet. So you can, you can find me there. You can check out the Modern Money Network. We’re trying to work on a humanities division page. We don’t quite have one yet, but what we do have is a webpage for the podcast that we host out of the Modern Money Network, humanities division called Money on the Left.  

And you can basically find us wherever you like to stream your podcast. Buzzsprout is our kind of home base, but you can find us on iTunes or Spotify or wherever else. And I think that’s about it. I mean, you know, you can look me up at the University of South Florida and send me an email if you want. That’s another way you can talk to me, but yeah, that’s about it. 

Steve Grumbine (56:18): 

Well, man, I appreciate this is a really, really great show. And I hope we can have you back on soon. I look forward to seeing you in New York City at the Third Annual MMT Conference. 

Scott Ferguson (56:28): 

Yeah, absolutely. I’m very excited and yeah. Thanks so much for having me on your show. I know we’ve been kind of talking about doing something like this for a long time and I’m really grateful that we were able to make it happen finally. 

Steve Grumbine (56:40): 

Absolutely. And this was a doozy, so thank you so much, sir. And with that folks, thank you for joining us for yet again, another episode of Macro N Cheese. Have a great day, everyone. 

Ending credits [music] (56:56): 

Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy, descriptive writing by Virginia Cotts and promotional artwork by Mindy Donham. Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressive Patreon account. If you would like to donate to Macro N Cheese, please visit patreon.com/realprogressives. [music]ike to donate tobacco and cheese, please visit patrion.com/real progressive .